The Open Charge Alliance have issued a press release to announce that they will be re-naming and expanding their mission: welcoming existing and new members to support open standard networks for charging electric vehicles.

Now known as “Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) Forum”, the aim of the organisation is to develop interoperability standards, which in simple terms, is the way that charge points will communicate with a central hub – relaying information such as: boot notification, diagnostics status notification, heartbeat, meter values, start transaction, status notification stop transaction and more.

The standard makes use of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP): a framework which makes it possible to send messages between components over the internet, which has already been standardised for similar applications, so can be simply rolled-out.

Standardising network communications will make it far easier for network operators and smart grid operators to manage networks, and also make it easier for integrators/aggregators to keep EV drivers updated with live charge point availability and location information, and to manage the billing process in the case of pay-per-use chargers.